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The Washington Roundtable is joined by Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown Law professor and self-proclaimed “Supreme Court nerd,” to examine President Trump’s increasing defiance of the Supreme Court. The panel discusses whether the Court’s strong rebuke of the President’s tariff policy obscures a broader pattern of expanding executive power through the use of emergency “shadow docket” rulings, a kind of shortcut for dealing with emergency requests. “I think that’s where the Justices have shown the most inclination to vote in ways that might be inconsistent as a matter of legal principle, but consistent as a matter of partisan political preference,” Vladeck says. Vladeck is the author of “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.”

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump’s State of the Union Was Long and Wrong,” by Susan B. Glasser

“The Supreme Court’s Complicated Takedown of Trump’s Tariffs,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

“The Right-Wing Nonprofit Serving A.I. Slop for America’s Birthday,” by Jessica Winter

“The Media Merger You Should Actually Care About,” by Jon Allsop

“Donald Trump’s Pantomime United Nations,” by Ishaan Tharoor

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

Shortly before the Presidential election of 2016, the telecommunications behemoth A.T. & T. announced a deal to acquire Time Warner, a merger that would bring together the former’s distribution network with the latter’s vast library of film and TV properties. After Donald Trump won, the deal hit a snag: namely, CNN, which Time Warner owned and Trump hated. Jane Mayer would later report, in this magazine, that in the summer of 2017 Trump summoned Gary Cohn, the head of his National Economic Council, and John Kelly, his chief of staff, and ordered them to block the merger. Per Mayer, Cohn told Kelly, “Don’t you fucking dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way.” But the D.O.J. did file suit. Makan Delrahim, then Trump’s top antitrust official, insisted that CNN’s coverage had nothing to do with the case, instead citing concerns about consumer choice and prices. According to the Times, “few at AT&T or Time Warner believed that.” Either way, a judge green-lit the deal, which closed at a valuation of a hundred billion dollars.

Years passed. A.T. & T. and Time Warner fought and broke up; the latter’s assets were spun off and merged with Discovery. Last summer, Paramount Skydance, itself a newly merged media company chaired by David Ellison, the son of the tech billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison, put in a bid to buy the combined Warner Bros. Discovery. It said no, thanks, but the interest did ultimately trigger a sales process, and a bidding war. Trump was, by now, back in office, and the issue of CNN again reared its ugly head. Paramount Skydance, which already owns CBS News, had courted controversy by pulling the network in a Trumpward direction; according to the Guardian, Ellison père dangled the prospect of similar changes at CNN, including the ouster of specific anchors—Brianna Keilar; Erin Burnett—whom Trump is known to dislike. By December, the Ellisons were on their heels: Warner Bros. accepted a rival bid from Netflix. (Notably, Netflix was not proposing to acquire CNN, which would be spun off into an independent company along with other cable assets.) Trump didn’t sound pleased. “They have a very big market share,” Trump said, of Netflix. “I’ll be involved in that decision.”

Fast forward to this month, and Trump was telling NBC that, actually, “I’ve decided I shouldn’t be involved” in the merger, and that “the Justice Department will handle it.” Given that Trump and his D.O.J. have themselves merged—see the new, giant Trump banner on the building’s façade—this claim seemed dubious. Sure enough, by this past weekend, Trump was bashing Netflix again, calling on the company to remove Susan Rice, a former top Obama official, from its board after she predicted future “accountability” for corporations that have bent the knee to Trump. Meanwhile, Paramount, which never gave up on its pursuit of Warner Bros., was given the opportunity to submit a final, improved offer, and did so. Yesterday, Ted Sarandos, the co-C.E.O. of Netflix, met with officials at the White House (but not with Trump himself) for talks that were reportedly cordial, yet ominous for the company’s deal prospects. Around the same time, Warner Bros. announced that it had deemed Paramount’s latest bid to be superior. Netflix had four days to counter it. An hour or so later, however, it announced that it was walking away, stunning the media world.

Netflix projected insouciance. “We’ve always been disciplined,” Sarandos and Greg Peters, the other C.E.O., said in a statement. “This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.” Investors and Wall Street analysts seemed to agree; various observers suggested that a tie-up doesn’t look great for either Paramount or Warner Bros. (The step-grandson of one of the actual founding Warner brothers likened the deal to “a shotgun wedding with your dumb cousin.”) Others freaked out, not least at the prospect of the Ellisons controlling CNN. Mark Thompson, the network’s current chairman, warned staff not to jump to conclusions, but many quickly did. (“We are doomed,” one employee told the media-news site Status. “We are f**ked,” said another.) Many looked at the Ellison-era CBS News as proof of concept; indeed, it’s very possible that that unit will somehow be fused with CNN under the stewardship of Bari Weiss, the anti-woke TV-news neophyte whom David Ellison tapped to lead CBS News in the fall, with results that have, variously, been cringe-inducing, icky, and democratically concerning. “It’s hell over here,” a CBS source told Justin Baragona, a media reporter at the progressive news site Zeteo, last night. The freakout, they added, was justified.

In a general sense, I’d agree. Weiss has not exactly turned CBS News into Pravda—and, as I’ve written before, she appears to be less a Trump lackey and more a standard-bearer for a tedious, adjacent strain of billionaire-class faux-contrarianism. But, at minimum, her corporate overlords clearly seem drunk on some cocktail of cowardice and greed, and the concentration of multiple major news organizations in their hands is precisely the sort of thing that people meant when they warned against the United States turning into Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. (And this is without going into Larry Ellison’s stake in the U.S. arm of TikTok.) Indeed, as I see it, no one should get to own two powerful national news networks, regardless of their politics. Similar logic applies—or applied, anyway—to the prospect of Netflix taking over Warner Bros., even without CNN. Given the ghoulishness of the Ellisons, it might have been tempting to cheer Netflix on, as the Good Suitor. But their takeover would have represented an even greater consolidation of corporate power, albeit one set to the jaunty string-pop of “Bridgerton” rather than “The Imperial March.” As Richard Brody observed in December, many Hollywood people saw the prospect as “existential, perhaps portending the end of mainstream moviegoing.” Trump may have been acting disingenuously when he highlighted the resulting market share. But his words weren’t wrong.

This week, I wrote about a much smaller, yet still highly consequential, media merger—a proposed deal for Nexstar, already a prolific owner of local TV stations, to grow further by taking over a rival, Tegna—and how it is contingent on Trump officials doing away with an obscure federal law barring such companies from reaching more than thirty-nine per cent of households nationwide. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, is supportive of the Nexstar deal, and of nixing the cap. Other proponents of the deal have sought to assuage concerns about unconstrained broadcast conglomerates by pointing out that D.O.J. antitrust enforcers will still get to weigh in.

For opponents, such reassurances might have carried more weight a year or so ago. Initially, on the subject of antitrust, Trump’s second term looked contiguous with the Biden Administration, which aggressively went after big mergers; Trump’s new antitrust chief, Gail Slater, was plucked from the growing corporate-skeptic wing of the G.O.P., and won praise from many progressives. This impression, however, was always complicated, and as time passed, the enforcers started to look more like enablers. There were growing allegations that MAGA-aligned lobbyists for big corporations were effectively navigating around Slater. This month, she found herself out of a job. Various observers concluded that MAGA’s turn against big business was over, if it was ever sincere to begin with. The Administration appears, increasingly, to favor not only big businesses that Trump likes but big business, period—even if he clearly favors the former much more.

Paramount’s bid now appears to be on a glide path, at least at the federal level. There are still antitrust hurdles to clear: European regulators could object, as could U.S. state officials. (Indeed, the Attorney General of California is already doing so.) But the former hurdle looks easier for Paramount to clear than it would have been for Netflix. And, as Matt Stoller, a researcher who opposes monopoly power, noted prior to yesterday’s news, the last time that states challenged a federally approved merger—between Sprint and T-Mobile, during Trump’s first term—they lost in court. I’ve found myself thinking back, for now, on that first Trump term. I recall being irritated at the time by media coverage of the proposed A.T. & T.–Time Warner deal, much of which focussed on the outrageous apparent premise of Trump’s opposition without really engaging with the substantive reasons to criticize the deal—and these were very real. (It was not for nothing that the tie-up ended in total disaster.) In a speech in 2018, Delrahim, Trump’s antitrust chief, described his legal fight against the Time Warner merger as “potentially historic,” and his broader goal as “protecting American consumers through enforcement of the antitrust laws.” These days, Trump may be back in office, but Delrahim isn’t. He now works for Paramount Skydance, where he is accelerating its merger with Warner Bros. ♦

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David Remnick sits down with Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the creators of a show he loves, “Industry,” which is currently airing its fourth season. The show is centered on the financial and personal dramas of junior employees at a fictional London investment bank. Down and Kay are old friends who both did unsuccessful stints in banking. “Before we could formulate our own identities, we allowed the institution to make them for us,” Down tells Remnick. But, having left finance for television, he says, “I still feel like I want to make money. . . . I’m never content with my career. The reason our show feels like it’s constantly changing and vibrating with electricity is because me and Konrad are, in terms of our careers. And, you know, we want to be successful. We were finance bros in the first instance.”

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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As Donald Trump and his Administration threaten to attack Iran, their motivations remain unclear. Does the President want to force Iran to make a nuclear deal, to replace the one that he scrapped in his first term, or is he really seeking regime change? To understand how this all might play out, David Remnick speaks with Karim Sadjadpour, a policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who writes about the Middle East for Foreign Affairs and other publications. Citing the disastrous precedents in Afghanistan and Iraq, Sadjadpour notes, “The last two decades has proven that we don’t have the ability to dictate . . . who comes to power the day after a military attack.”

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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After protests over the economy erupted across Iran late last year, reports emerged that the regime was killing protesters. Donald Trump threatened to intervene, but did not. Estimates vary widely, but some note that thirty thousand people or more may have been killed. Now as the U.S. sends a huge military force to the Gulf, Iranians are waiting for war—and many in the country are in the shocking position of hoping for conflict, if it will end the Ayatollah’s government. The reporter Cora Engelbrecht has been recording her conversations with sources on the ground about what that could mean. Their voices were altered or overdubbed for our story, to protect them from reprisal.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

On “Where’s My Phone?,” the second track on Mitski’s eighth studio album, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” she sings, “I just want my mind to be a clear glass / Clear glass with nothing in my head.” The lyric serves as a thesis statement of sorts for a concept album that is as much an immersive literary experience as an exercise in listening. Mitski is the writer of these songs, but the speaker is someone else, a reclusive woman who resides in an unkempt house. The album’s dispatches from her secluded life style are propelled by the question of who is doing the looking and what that looking reveals about the experience of an other. Before she wishes to have a clear mind, for example, the narrator is berated by a woman on the street, who calls her a “ditch on my block.” On “In a Lake,” the speaker insists that she’d never live in a small town, because “everywhere you go makes your heart ache.” We come to understand that the outside world does not favor the speaker, who is perceived to have a type of strangeness about her. But when the lens shifts toward the interior, articulating the woman’s private monologues, the attitude is softer and more generous, even when her words seem steeped in a sense of ongoing dread. This woman, when sequestered in her house, feels more at peace than she could ever feel in the world beyond her door.

Mitski, now thirty-five, has always written songs of exceptional rawness and vulnerability, placing herself in closeup against a thin layer of glass. Her lyrical explorations of navigating a deeply feeling heart earned her a reputation as an indie bard of melancholy and loneliness, and fans, in turn, forged an intense parasocial relationship with her. In response, Mitski became immensely protective of her privacy. (In a New York profile from 2022, she refused to share the names of her cats, concerned that fans might use the information to track her down.) In an era when sharing your art tends to mean giving yourself to the public, Mitski has become about as reclusive as a musician of her stature can be, which makes the distance between the speaker’s concerns and the writer’s concerns, on “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” perhaps not so wide after all (though, as a person who writes poems, I tend to think that the exact distance is hardly any of the public’s business).

Mitski’s sound and writing style have evolved on almost every album she’s released. Her early album “Retired from Sad, New Career in Business,” from 2013, relied on big orchestral swells alongside electronics. Her breakout, “Bury Me at Makeout Creek,” released the following year, felt at times like a punk-rock sprint of guitar and drumbeats. On “Be the Cowboy,” her 2018 album, her production was more lush and full without wholly abandoning her flair for fuzzy and distorted guitar work. “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is a bit of a mashup of many of Mitski’s past endeavors, featuring big orchestral swings and moments of loud, frantic guitar, but its formal ambitions feel secondary to its expansive lyrical themes. On a line level, the songwriting comes alive with imagery and ache, such as on the album-closing song, “Lightning”—“When I die / Could I come back as the rain?” But the most fascinating quality of “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me” is how Mitski manages to embody an “I” with the full sense and spirit of a wonderfully complicated central character who is orbiting heartbreak and loss. In the song “Cats,” the narrator anticipates the absence of someone she still loves, a void being filled by two cats who sleep in bed with her at night. “Instead of Here” opens with a knock on the door and the woman depressed and lying on the floor instead of answering, with “death crouchin’ ” beside her. On “I’ll Change for You,” a listener overhears the woman on a drunken phone call, insisting that she’d do anything to be loved again—that she’s willing to change, to become whoever is needed to make the person return.

Despite how abject all this sounds, the protagonist does not seem weak or worthy of pity. Contrary to what she is enduring and expressing, she is rendered as someone who possesses a level of control. As the album proceeds, the lens shifts: she isn’t the one who is on the verge of madness; the world is, and she is one of the few people with the good sense to stay away from it as much as she can. The album’s concern is one that has shaped my own life and the lives of many people I know: when the world is increasingly inhospitable, is isolating oneself that irrational of a response? Mitski has no answer or illuminating moment that will make plain sense of this question for you, but the song “That White Cat,” propelled by churning percussion, perhaps provides a clue. The woman watches from her window as a neighborhood cat marks her house—a house that, she acknowledges, now pretty well belongs to the cat. At first, she insists, she has to go to work to pay for the cat’s house. Then again, to pay for the house is to pay for the wasp who lives in the roof, for the family of possums, for the bugs who will drink her blood, and for the birds who will eat those bugs, only to be killed by the cat. There is a thin border between isolation and loneliness, and, even if you retreat from the world, you are still in it. ♦